Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

Author David J. Garrow's, "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama," is a thoroughgoing, well-documented, and highly readable biography of the 44th U.S. President--and yet, sadly, same-said volume is seriously marred by scattered, however regular, citational employment of expletives in all their fully-written ignominy.

"Hmm...oversensitive," you say? Call it what you will, irrespective: upon completion of this otherwise commendable work the nauseous residue of expletive employment remains most salient!

"Well, well," might one rejoin, "politics is a dirty business." Yes, and apparently becoming all-the-dirtier! The former First Lady (Michelle Obama) herself was long of the opinion that politics was beneath her husband. And my point is that the liberal usage of expletives by many associated with Stateside politics--such usage perspicuously symptomatic of a definitive lack of desiderative profundity--manifests the depraved and depraving status of U.S. politics today.

Simply put, if politics, per se, is in fact hegemonised via the current socio-economic paradigm ("capitalism"), the present and self-evident scrofulousness of politics is engendered by the inherent scrofulousness of capitalism (a.k.a., "legalized larceny," let alone the principal source of anthropogenic global warming)!

When (and if) the "society of abundance" supersedes that of "scarcity"--ultimately entailing the "withering away of the state" (due to lack of need thereof)--I'm confident that expletives themselves will have been buried with the necessity of politics and no longer deface and delimit thought.

I had great difficulty in reading this massive book which badly needed an editor. I gave up after reading the first chapter, which didn't give any meaningful information or author's justification/inspiration to continue reading. I agree with all previous one star critical reviews. This is a book of boring details, not the big picture of Obama which a reader would expect from a presidential biography. Save your money for another author with a critical editor to bring out a biography that is readable and believable about Obama's many lucky breaks to get the 2008 nomination, otherwise he would have remained in the U.S. Senate.

This book has 1461 pages, of which 271 pages are end notes; 34 pages of bibliography; and 67 index pages.

David is a wimp when writing this book. He either doesn't know his facts or is afraid to tell the truth. For example, he writes that BO may have received government educational grants under another name when it is a FACT that he did and we know the name under which he applied as a foreign student. My question is, why doesn't David Garrow know?????

After reading the first 20 pages, I actually had to look at the cover to make sure this was the barry bio and not the history of Chicago steel mills and local church politics.
Any book that starts off this way is either going to be fascinating or a total disaster. Guess which one it is...

Just got done reading the sample available to me since I purchased it on Kindle. Wow what a load of crap. Will be returning the box unopened as soon as it arrives. This is click bait to an extreme. Stay away. First thirty pages is on unions and Chicago with all kinds of worthless stuff that is ("what difference at this point does it Make!)